The man Descartes claimed, as much
as any other, to attain to heaven, "but having learned as a thing very
sure that the way to it is not less open to the most ignorant than to
the most learned, and that the revealed truths which lead thither are
beyond our intelligence, I did not dare submit them to my feeble
reasonings, and I thought that to undertake to examine them and to
succeed therein, I should want some extraordinary help from heaven and
need to be more than man." And here we have the man. Here we have the
man who "did not feel obliged, thank God, to make a profession
(_metier_) of science in order to increase his means, and who did not
pretend to play the cynic and despise glory." And afterwards he tells us
how he was compelled to make a sojourn in Germany, and there, shut up in
a stove (_poele_) he began to philosophize his method. But in Germany,
shut up in a stove! And such his discourse is, a stove-discourse, and
the stove a German one, although the philosopher shut up in it was a
Frenchman who proposed to himself to attain to heaven.
And he arrives at the _cogito ergo sum_, which St. Augustine had already
anticipated; but the _ego_ implicit in this enthymeme, _ego cogito, ergo
ego sum_, is an unreal--that is, an ideal--_ego_ or I, and its _sum_,
its existence, something unreal also. "I think, therefore I am," can
only mean "I think, therefore I am a thinker"; this being of the "I am,"
which is deduced from "I think," is merely a knowing; this being is
knowledge, but not life.
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